Why would somebody bother to keep on sending stuff out after that many rejection letters? I don’t have an answer. I’d waited so long to start. You know, a whole decade of my life went by with me saying that this is what I wanted to do, but not doing it. I had reached such a critical level of self-disgust. I didn’t want to die saying, “I think I could have done it.”
Since I was doing the work of telling stories, it was then an easy enough thing to then send the stories out and to keep on doing it, so I didn’t have to say some 50 years hence, “I think I could’ve done that.”
Well you know, I’ve been in so many writing workshops, writing classes, and to the right of me and to the left of me, there’s always somebody much more talented than I am. And what I figured out is they’re not willing to go through the rejection, which is enormous, and then the compromise that comes with editing your work. I decided a long time ago that I didn’t have to be talented. I just had to be persistent, and that that was something that I could control — the persistence. I’ve always been kind of persistent.